Twins names in modern Japan

The number of twin births in today’s society is constantly increasing. In present-day Japan, there is a pair of twins for every 150 newborns. There are societies, associations of twins, schools and institutions for twins which investigate this sibling phenomenon. The branches of science, such as medicine, neurophysiology, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics are isolated in studying twins. Parents of twins and twins themselves convene in societies of different levels (e.g., NHK «Japanese Association of twins» and Jamba «Japanese Association of support for families with twins and triplets»). Since the tradition of naming twins in Japan is not well-developed, parents have recourse to already existing models, and, aware of the close relationship between the children, tend to emphasize it in a way. The paper analyzes the 835 name pairs of twins (197 pairs of boys, 389 pairs of girls, 176 opposite-sex couples, 65 triplets and 8 quadruplets) along with the reasons from parents, who commented on their choices through specialized web sites. The analysis highlights following regularities: the general character or two characters in the names; the names constitute semantic unity; the names are different, but there is a unifying sense (mention of the season, time of the day, twin flower names) or phonetic correlation; the names are based either on an anagram or rearranged syllables. Those meeting the principle of vertical co-naming are mostly female names (mother and daughter). The names reflect the good wishes of parents, their passions and hobbies. There are also some curious examples of naming. In general, names of twins, including two children and more, emphasize their kinship. This trend is particularly strong in the same-sex pairs of twins, with the percentage of girls’ correlated names (367 pairs of 389, 94 %) to be slightly higher than that of boys’ (180 pairs of 197, 91 %). Common names for opposite sex twins is lower (137 pairs of 176, 78 %). Regardless of gender, children names for triplets and quadruplets in some way correlated to 90 %. Residual 10 % of the names show no parallelism, and the parents commented that was a deliberate act of giving completely different names. Among the analyzed material, there is only 1 % of identical names approximately, coincident both in sound and writing and indicating the infinite variety of the Japanese list of names.